'Peculia' is a swift and entertaining read

Peculia (2002, Fantagraphics)
Story and Art: Richard Sala
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Peculia wanders the countryside and neighborhood around her mansion and encounters various supernatural menaces, usually after disregarding advice from her faithful servant, Ambrose.

Peculia was one of Richard Sala's signature characters. She's a young woman who usually appears wearing a "little black dress", When she's not being menaced by odd creatures or villains who seem to have stepped out of B-movies or gothic romances, she's being stalked by the mysterious Obscurus and his agent Justine. Exactly what the relationship is between Obscurus, Justine, and Peculia is never revealed, but there are hints that Obscuras and Peculia were once romantically involved, or at least very good friends, and that Justine is jealous of them. What caused the rift between Peculia and Obscurus, why he is isolated in a secret base and always masked is also never revealed--although he seems to be suffering under some of magical curse--but his spying on Peculia through Justine just as often puts Peculia in danger as saves her from it.

"Peculia" collects nine short tales that originally appeared in "Evil Eye" 1-9 during 1998 and 1999. Each is a self-contained story, and each feature a mix of horror and humor for which Sala's whimsical, simple art style is the perfect vehicle. The tone of stories reminds me of Poverty Row 1940s horror flicks with more than a little 1960s/70s Eurotrash horror movies and sex comedies throw in--and I'm invoking those in a positive way, as I find many of those movies quite fun and these comics capture the best of what they have to offer.

Over the course of the nine tales, Peculia's strolls brings her into encounters with weird gremlins who are attracted to music; three witches with a strange secret; a crazed widower who would cause many Edgar Allen Poe characters to reexamine their choices in life; a strange mystic sorority and the chutuloid monster that ends up dooming them, a homicidal girl battling a cult devoted to Bast; hoards of zombies and maniacs; a psychopathic psychiatrist conducting unholy research on unwilling subjects; Death himself; and more weird townsfolk than you think could be packed into one book. And all of this while Justine and Obscurus lurk nearby to either cause or solve problems.

While the first five tales in the book get increasingly good, and the remaining four hold steady-qualitywise, I still have to quibble with the fact that we never get an explanation for why Obscurus is seemingly cursed with total anonymity toward anyone but Justine; it's the one thing that I was disappointed over when I got to the end of the book. On the other hand, I was so delighted by the tiny continuity detail that tied the first story and eighth story in the book together that I am almost able to overlook my annoyance and so keep my rating of Seven of Ten Stars for the book.

"Peculia" is a swift and enjoyable read. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys crisp, straightforward cartooning and horror stories told with a sense of humor. (As a final note, I should mention that the book also contains a never-before-published color story. It's a fun, wordless little tale, but we don't talk about things that aren't in black-and-white in these parts!)

Post-Script From the Department of Odd Observations

In her first appearance--originally in "Evil Eye" #1 (1998)--she wore a pair of black shoes, perfectly matched to her little black dress.

There was a time where Peculia wore shoes...

She left those shoes behind halfway through her second appearance appearance--in "Evil Eye" #2 (1998)--and she went barefoot everywhere from then on (which was 10 more issues of "Evil Eye", various pin-ups., and "Peculia and the Groon Grove Vampires" (2005).

... but, once she left them behind, she never wore shoes again.

What does this mean? We have no idea, but we further observed that most female characters that appeared in the Peculia stories were barefoot. (The four panels above were excerpted from the first and second stories in the "Peculia" (2002) collection.)